Situated Chat Analysis as a Window to the User's Perspective: Aspects of Temporal and Sequential Organization

Abstract

This article addresses the temporal organization and the users’ perception of conversational progression in ongoing chat conversations and presents a situated model of chat participation that focuses on how chat users individually manage their involvement in conversational interaction. It reports on the results of a case study on how chat users adapt their individual message production to the perceived momentary status of interaction. The study is based on multimodal data from chat user observations that capture both the users' onscreen activities (typing, editing, scrolling) and their gaze orientation toward the different visual targets that are relevant for producing and processing messages. The findings show that participating in and contributing to a chat is a highly individualized accomplishment. As a consequence, it is suggested, it is necessary to rethink the extent to which categories from the turn-taking paradigm can be adopted for the analysis of synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC).